Sunlight is sneaking through the blinds. It’s morning again.
Brain to Marilyn: Hey, get up. I’ve got stuff to do.
Marilyn to Brain: Shut up. I’m tired. Let me sleep or I swear I’ll take a pill and shut you down.
Brain (sullen): Fine. Be that way.
Marilyn drifts off to sleep for half an hour.
Brain: How about that dream I sent you eh?
Marilyn: That was horrible. Why did you do that?
Brain: I thought it was cool the way I turned butterflies into flying monsters. You didn’t like it?
Marilyn: No, I did not like it. And right now, I don’t like you.
Brain to Marilyn: Logic and Emotion are going at it again. Wow, this one’s a real knock down drag out fight. Loud, huh.
Marilyn to Logic and Emotion: If you guys don’t cut it out, I’m going to stop this car and you are both getting a time-out.
Logic and Emotion together: HE STARTED IT MOM!
Marilyn to Logic and Emotion: I don’t care who started it. SHUT UP! I need some sleep!
Logic and Emotion together (meekly): Sorry Mom. Don’t be mad …
Brain to Marilyn: I have a message from Spine. She says you need to take something for pain. Spine is unhappy.
Marilyn to Brain: Spine is always unhappy.
Brain to Marilyn: Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Oh, and Bladder wants a trip to the bathroom.
Marilyn: Oh fine. (Muttering all the way)
Marilyn gets up, hauls self to bathroom. Comes back with Tylenol. Takes pills, crawls into bed pulling covers up over head, sighing as she settles into the embrace of the best bed in the world.
Brain to Marilyn: Hey, I’ve got a great idea for a story! How about our little morning chats, huh? Wouldn’t that be cool? Come on, get up before you forget the whole idea. Lazy daisy get your butt outta bed.
Marilyn to Brain: I haven’t even had 6 hours of sleep. I’m too tired to write.
Brain to Marilyn: You are never too tired to write! Get up, get up, it’s morning again.
Sounds: Dogs howling, yapping, more howling.
Marilyn: Can you make the dogs shut up?
Brain: Sorry, no direct access to doggie brains.
Marilyn to Brain: Okay. You win. I’m up, I’m up. Coffee. I hope we aren’t out of half and half. I’m never going to get a whole night’s sleep, am I.
A huge thank you goes toMike at Mikes Film Talk, who thinks more of me than I think of me. By giving me this award, he has honored me while simultaneously depriving me of someone on whom I would have liked to bestow this award. Mike certainly deserves it. He has a great site that is only partly film-centric. Mike is a lot more than a film critic. He is a literary omnivore, writing everything from personal history and fiction, to book and movie reviews. And such excellent writing it is. Please make sure to visit him. You’ll be glad you did.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the folks over at Moment Matters for originating this unique award. They’ve also created a fine logo for recipients to display on their walls. There are words and music to accompany it. I’m sorry I don’t have the music, but following are the words and they’re lovely:
Awarding the people who live in the moment, The noble who write and capture the best in life, The bold who reminded us what really mattered - Savoring the experience of quality time.
Pretty nice! As with most awards in the WordPress Blogging community, there are a few rules. Simple guidelines. Not onerous, but specific. Since this is my first encounter with this award, here they are. They are simple:
Rules:
You can reuse this post, altered to reflect your nominees and including your acceptance speech. You can reuse as much of this post as makes sense for you.
Your can write your speech or put it on video.
Winners have the privilege of awarding The Best Moment Award to chosen recipients. Your post should contain theindividuals and blogsyou are nominating.
There is no specific requirement for number of new recipients.
Inform your winners you’ve chosen them.
As a courtesy, please link back to whoever gave you the award.
Resources:
I’ve included these since they are a legacy from Mike’s post and provides guidelines if you need help:
What makes a good acceptance speech?
Gratitude. Thank the people who helped you along the way
I’m genuinely touched by this award. Touched and grateful. Receiving appreciation from ones peers is a special kind of recognition. It means more than I can easily express.
Living in the moment has become a way of life. After finally admitting I have no control over the future, I relaxed, stopped trying to push the river, and began to enjoy whatever came, even stuff I would have considered “bad news” in my misspent youth. I’m a lot happier since I stopped trying to force life to go my way. Living in the moment and going with the flow takes a whole lot less effort than fighting the current. Whatever chills and thrills come with the ride, I’m ready. Remarkably, I keep discovering it’s fun. Live and learn. I wish I’d learned a little earlier!
This moment — this exact moment in time — IS your life! This is the day you’ve been waiting for. It will never come again. Enjoy it.
I am delighted to accept The Best Moment Award originated by MomentMatters.com … another site definitely worth checking out.
I never stop being awestruck when I realize I have influenced someone in a positive way, maybe even made a difference in one or more lives in this mad, mad world. Again, thank you Mike!
Blogging has become very important to me. I have always been a writer, but until I started blogging, I never wrote about personal things. As a professional, I wrote what I was paid to write. Now, I write from my head and my heart. It has been life changing. Everything inspires me. Other bloggers — especially Mike — have influenced me in more ways than I can list. But in the end, all of life is inspiration.
To all of my friends and followers, thank you for taking time out of your busy lives to share mine. The blogging community has given me a sense of purpose, participation, comradeship and a much broader life-view than I ever had before. There’s a lot of ugly stuff going on everywhere. Scary stuff, unfair, wrong, dangerous, evil. We haven’t the power fix everything, but we have some influence as individuals and collectively. We can help each other through difficult times, rejoice with each other over triumphs (they are few enough), and maybe give something back to our human community.
Everything we share has value. Knowledge, memories, pictures that express beauty or expose evil. Stories we write, books we read and recommend. Movies we see and share. Humor that banishes sadness. It’s not just big ideas that matter. Small things resonate and change lives too. Never think the ordinary parts of life are not worth exploring. They may be the most important of all.
Anything we do to make someone feel good, help them think in a different direction, see the world in a new way, is a deed well done. By giving of ourselves, we continue to grow the chain of good will around the world. If blogging has any ultimate purpose, that’s it.
I have saved every “like” I’ve ever gotten and will continue to do so until my email explodes. I am so glad you like me . What a miracle this virtual community is to me. You touch me. I love reading your comments, love answering them. Love writing them, too because I want you to know I appreciate your work. That people follow me makes me glow in the dark. No really, it does. It saves a lot of electricity!
For all of you who I follow, each of you enriches me. Your views about the world, your pictures of it, your understanding and your humor brighten my days, keep my mind alive and make my world exciting.
Like Mike, I have felt the wings of the dark angel brush me. Life is infinitely precious with all of its perils and problems.
Thank you all for making my world a better place to live, and thank you Mike for appreciating the best of me.
The winners for the Best Moment Award are:
I have had to think hard about this one because I can’t give it back to Mike, who I would have given it to. Like Mike, I’m going to limit this to people who really actually truly have influenced me and changed me way of thinking, writing, looking at reality or unreality, as you would have it.
For Sharla at Catnip of Life – She’s having a rough patch and I know she’s not really online right now, but eventually when her life is less fraught, she’ll be back and this award, so well-deserved, will be waiting for her. With all the wretched difficulties going on in her world, she is endlessly kind, caring, and good. Deep to the bone, a good person. You don’t meet so many of them!
For Rarasaur who has a name, but I can never find it when I need it. She shares my somewhat addled and bizarre view of life, has overcome much and has much to overcome. With sense of humor intact and flags flying, she’s challenged me to match concept and vision in new ways. and I’ve been having a great deal of fun with her various blogging challenges that force me to put pictures and concepts together and make them coherent. Better yet, she makes me laugh.
To Hot Rod Cowgirl whose photo essays make me yearn for a life I’ve never had and has become something of an icon and a living hope for me … to be in the mountains surrounded by nature and horses and sunsets is a dream and it makes me glad that someone is really living it.
To Tyson at Head In a Vice. It’s not about movies, though he writes great reviews — mostly about movies I’m unlikely to watch. It’s how he brings people together. Starting with a fondness for horror movies, he has created a community of inclusion, involving all kinds of people in his projects and always having something kind to say about everyone, no matter how strange their choices or taste. He has worked hard and deserves recognition.
To everyone else, I know you and appreciate you. I’m trying to follow the leader in making this award specific to people who, as they live in their moment and in sharing them, have made their moments mine.
I apologise in advance to anyone who may feel slighted. Most of you have gotten awards from me in the past and will again in the future. This one is specific; I hope I’ve chosen well. There are a few of you to whom I don’t give awards because you don’t want them. But I appreciate you anyhow! I have many wonderful followers and I don’t like having to choose. But sometimes — and this is one of those time — that’s the way it is.
My awardees are a varied bunch, but each is great in his/her own way.
The last part of this Award process is the instruction to share this with your followers and to tweet your “success” with the hash tagged #MomentMatters. And as soon as I figure out how to do that, I will!
Congratulations to all my winners and I want you to know that you have touched me.
Some years back, there was an incident in the Boston Police Department‘s boot camp. In an attempt to be as tough as any Marine Corps drill instructor, the BPD instructor in charge of recruits forced a group of newbies to stay at hard exercise during one of the hottest days of the summer, without rest, food or water.
One of the recruits died when his kidneys failed. He had an undetected pre-existing condition. Dehydration proved fatal. This was a tragedy and a scandal.
The Boston Herald is one of the city’s two leading papers. The Globe is now owned by the New York Times and wants to be taken seriously. They have excellent writers and often the most thorough and unbiased coverage of important news. The Herald is a tabloid with a really great sports section. Intellectuality be damned, if you follow the teams, you read the Herald. Besides, the Globe is ridiculously expensive on Sundays.
So, back to the story. As it unfolded, the Herald pointed out that the young man who had died was already afflicted with kidney problems which were exasperated by being forced to go without water, food or rest in extremely hot weather.
I looked up from the paper and said to Garry, “This poor fellow suffered from exasperated kidneys. I can hear them now … (in a kidney voice) ‘That’s IT, I’ve HAD it, I’m OUTTA here …’ “
The dreaded spell-checker had struck again. The word had been exacerbated but the spell-checker didn’t know the word, so … the young man died of exasperated kidneys. What a pity. And so young, too.
There’s a moral to this story and that is (I hope) obvious and relevant to all of us who write or blog. Don’t depend on spell-checkers. They are helpful, but they are not intelligent. They have no ability to understand context or meaning. Or, for that matter style. You may want to say “my own” rather than simply “my.” The spell-checker will argue the point until you want to put your fist through the screen.
Proofreading is a big problem for all self-published writers, including bloggers. I’m tempted to give up on text and publish only pictures without captions. Even a headline could prove fatal. I am the typo queen. Worse, I hold the cut and paste error championship. When moving text, I can count on leaving something behind or taking something away that ought to have been left behind. It’s frustrating, it’s embarrassing and occasionally funny … but not in a good way.
If I took everything to heart, I would have long since given up blogging. I do not have someone dedicated to proofreading and/or editing my copy. There are two reasons for this:
No one wants to do it. They have other things to do (What? Something is more important than me? How could that be? Aren’t I the center of the universe?)
No one I know is any better at proofreading than I am. I know this because I self-published a book. It was read and re-read by all my friends and family members and there are dozens of typos remaining.
Authors are generally lousy proofreaders of their own work. Sometimes, we are lousy proofreaders, period. As authors, we see what we meant, not necessarily what’s really on the page. It has nothing to do with sloppiness or not caring. Writing and proofreading are different skill sets. Hemingway didn’t have to do his own proofreading, nor did Thomas Wolfe. If they’d had to proof and edit their own copy without the excellent support of their publisher and Maxwell Perkins, they would never have made it into print. Nor would many of today’s most popular authors like Tom Clancy make it to print. Clancy, by his own admission is a very poor editor and proofreader … and in many people’s opinions, not a great writer, either, but I digress.
William Maxwell Evarts Perkins, was the editor for Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe and many others. He is probably America’s most famous literary editor. Where is he when I need him?
In the past few decades, editors and proofreaders have been mostly eliminated as too costly. Authors are expected to present press-ready manuscripts. Unless you are one of a publisher’s big money-making authors, there’s a very high likelihood that no one will read your manuscript before sending it for publication. The result has been visibly lower quality manuscripts. You see it in printed books and even more on e-books. The official position of publishers is nobody cares. But readers do care.
Who doesn’t care? Publishers don’t care. Readers don’t get a say in the matter. If we want to read, we learn to cope with and compensate for text errors. The absence of proofreaders and editors is part of cross-industry cost-cutting and bottom-lining. The idea is to keep eliminating support services until there are no more services to cut … and then be thunderstruck that your product has suffered.
I spend hours going over my posts and I still miss stuff. It’s infuriating and embarrassing, but no one has time or inclination to read everything I write. It’s my blog and my responsibility. Not everyone has someone to backstop blog posts. My choice has been to write shorter — and fewer — posts. Fewer words, fewer mistakes. As it is, I spend more time proofing than writing. Ten minutes to write the post, 2 hours or more to proofread. There aren’t enough hours in my day.
If this means people won’t read my stuff because I’m a crappy proofreader, then I throw my hands into the air and say fine, whatever. I agree punctuation and spelling count, but so does content. If punctuation and spelling are the only things that count, something is wrong with the reader, not just the writer.
But what about spell-checkers? Surely they will catch the typographical errors!
Yes and no. Remember exasperated kidneys? Spell-checkers will find words that are misspelled and occasionally a few words used incorrectly. Spell-checkers will never find words that are spelled correctly but should not be there (cut and paste errors). They will “decide” what you wrote should be something else — witness exasperated instead of exacerbated. Spell-checkers only catch blatant misspellings. They won’t catch a missing word, a wrong word, an extra word. If you let them, they will change your text to mean something different. And don’t forget the pleasures of auto-correct. That’s a total hoot.
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There’s no convenient simple answer. In the end, we do the best we can with whatever resources are available. If perfection is going to be a requirement for blogging, most of us would give up. Perfection will never be achieved by anyone.
The purpose of a cliché is to make creative thought unnecessary. Television and Hollywood are cliché driven. How could scripts be cranked out without clichés? When I worked at Doubleday, we used to post (in those days, “posting” meant putting a printed paper on your bulletin board using a tack) lists of useful clichés for various writing problems.
I was the editor of the Romance Library, so I became the go-to writer if you needed an alternate way to say “fell in love” or “wanted to jump his/her bones” but being a G-rated enterprise, had to put it more delicately. If that failed, there was the “shout out” method. We had open cubbies, so if you needed another way of saying something, you yelled it out and voices from around the office would offer suggestions. It was a lot faster than looking it up, which back then, meant getting out the thesaurus and actually looking it up. To write, we used — are you ready? — typewriters and carbon paper! To handle corrections, we used liquid white out and correction tape. Whoa, you’ve never heard of correction tape? You are so young, grasshopper.
My husband, having spent his working life in the news biz, has his own favorite broadcast news clichés and he is kind enough to share them with me. He knows how fond I am of words. My personal favorite, when speaking of the murderer du jour is “He kept pretty much to himself.” To be spoken with a straight face and utmost sincerity. They do this in television shows and on the news, but remarkably, they also say stuff like this in real courtrooms. It turns out that lawyers and D.A.s are just as unoriginal as everyone else.
Then, there is the reporter, looking dolefully over the scene of destruction: “Can you give me a sense of how you feel?” he or she says. Surprisingly, very few people whack him or her upside the head with something hard and heavy. I think it’s largely because the presence of cameras pretty much guarantees getting bagged for assault.
Moving back to the courtroom, the mother of the thug who proudly flaunts an encyclopedic resume of violent crime says “He’s a good boy. He’s been turning his life around!” The same, using the past tense, can be said of victims of drug deals gone bad. It never gets old. Guffaws are muffled as judges look down on loud laughter during trials and arraignments.
Let’s not forget the classics: sports! Wow, there are too many great clichés to cover in a short post. Every announcer and player knows them and they say them with total conviction as if they are the first people to have ever spoken these words. Do they memorize them in advance? There’s a scene in “Bull Durham” where Kevin Costner, the old pro, is teaching the rookie (Tim Robbins) how to talk to the press so he will know the right clichés when the moment comes. Maybe they really do memorize them.
What would we do without clichés? How about some original thinking? I mean it’s possible, right? I grant you sometimes originality is a waste of valuable time when a perfectly good cliché will do. But sometimes, situations arise that beg for something clever. New television shows might benefit from not being exactly like every other show the preceded it and against which it competes. Every now and again, a show comes along where characters, plot and dialogue are not 100% predictable, so it can be done if anyone is willing to make the effort. Mostly, they don’t. And they wonder why people lose interest. It would also be nice if the few shows that start out with a bang wouldn’t end with a whimper. Writers quickly become lazy, but despite rumors that viewers are morons, we do notice as the quality of a show deteriorates. We notice and we stop watching.
The other night, Garry commented that whatever it was — a new show I believe and no, I do not remember its name — we’d seen it before. Being as this was the premier episode, you would think that if they are going to bother to bring on a new show, they might consider writing an original script for it. You would be wrong.
“We’ve seen everything before,” I said.
“We’re old,” he said.
“We may be old, but that’s not the problem. New shows are exactly like old shows. I think they resue the old scripts too, change some names and use them again. We need to get our head right and stop hoping for originality and just try to appreciate when they do the same old stuff better than usual.”
“Maybe. It would save us from continuous disappointment.”
“Yup.
Currently on the tube there are perhaps half a dozen shows that surprise us sometimes. “White Collar” wins for being the only crime or cop show that doesn’t only solve murders. They deal with crimes in which no one got killed! What creative genius thought of that?
“Elementary” has been unpredictable and has, in return, won our loyalty.
Amongst the surprises, “Anger Management” is actually funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. Wow. A funny comedy! A unique concept indeed. It has been a long time since a television sitcom was anything other than dull, insipid and often insulting to what’s left of our intelligence.
Our Friday night fix is “Blue Bloods.” The scripts are not always as original as I would like, they aren’t rewrites of old “Law and Order” episodes either. Tom Selleck alone is worth your time.
There are a few other shows that occasionally aren’t completely predictable, but for the most part, we know what’s going to happen from the opening scene. Often, the credits are enough to give away the story. The guest star did it. Why else would he or she be on the show?
It’s not impossible to write original material, but it does require extra effort. C’mon guys. You can do it. Give it a whirl. We will all be grateful … and you can be proud of your work. It’s a win-win.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
- ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
- ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’
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Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. ‘They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’
- ‘Would you tell me please,’ said Alice, ‘what that means?’
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‘Now you talk like a reasonable child,’ said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. ‘I meant by “impenetrability” that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.’
- ‘That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
